Free Bad Girls by Rebecca Chance Page A

breasts, gently rounded hips, and a tiny waist. Slava’s eyebrows had been faint, before they’d faded almost completely; Amber’s were two perfect straight lines, rising fractionally at the outer corners, slanting upwards in parallel with the slant of her thick-lashed green eyes.
    ‘Just you and me,’ Slava said comfortably. ‘That’s all we need in the end. Just you and me, so cosy together.’
    It was a regular incantation, what Slava always said when Amber returned from a shoot away, or a weekend date, and Amber responded as she always did: ‘Just you and me, Matka. ’
    Slava nodded happily. ‘You’re still here?’ she asked, her eyes on the television. ‘Why are you still here, silly girl? You said you need to unpack your pretty clothes.’ Slava waved her hand. ‘Don’t look at me. It’s not worth looking at me,’ she added. ‘Go and look at yourself in the mirror. God was only practising when he made me. With you, he got it right.’
    Amber was still smiling as she went into the hall and carried her luggage upstairs to her bedroom. She looked at it for a moment, then pulled her Cartier gold and enamel cigarette case out of her pocket and unlocked the door to the roof terrace. There was a light breeze blowing, and she settled onto the wooden bench in the little trellised gazebo.
    I’ve got so much to thank Matka for, she thought, pulling out a Silk Cut and lighting it up. I wouldn’t have any of this if it weren’t for her. And what other mother would say ‘God was only practising when he made me,’ and actually mean it?
    This was a favourite expression of Slava’s, and, crucially, it never contained a shred of self-pity or fishing for a compliment. Slava was brutally realistic. Amber’s father had walked out when Amber was only a baby, but Slava had coped bravely, despite being a penniless immigrant with a limited command of English. Not once had his name been mentioned between them that Amber could remember. Slava had moved out of London for a fresh start, to Margate, a flea-bitten seaside town in Kent, once a lively resort, now run down and dispirited. With no real skills, Slava had taken jobs cleaning offices at night to support her and her daughter, living in a hostel at first, and then a series of one-room rented flats above newsagents and bookies and fast-food places. Always noisy, always poor, always grimy and often mouse-infested, no matter how much Slava cleaned.
    Amber’s memory of those years was of her mother watching over her like a hawk during the day, walking her to school, picking her up, then locking her in every night when Slava went out to her cleaning job. Slava had alluded darkly to all the bad things that could happen to unattended girls, things she saw on the night streets as she went back and forth to work. She was determined to keep Amber safe. No teenage pregnancies or drug habits for her daughter; Amber wasn’t going to turn out like most of her classmates, knocked up at sixteen, trying to get a flat off the council, planning to live off benefits for the rest of her life. Slava saw the big picture, always. Her ex-husband had been a very handsome man. Slava herself wasn’t so bad. Maybe the daughter they had made would inherit their good looks; maybe Amber would be her passport out of poverty.
    But when it came, it was much earlier and much faster and infinitely more life-changing than Slava could ever have anticipated. At fourteen, Amber hit puberty, and everything changed. The gangly, awkward, skinny teenager, ignored by all her classmates, suddenly sprouted, almost overnight, into a pin-up girl. The high cheekbones, the full lips, the long legs, all the features that had got her nicknamed ‘Duck-Mouth’ and ‘Skeletor’ now turned her into an object of such desire that Slava was quick to pull her out of school. The boys weren’t the problem so much as the girls. Amber was already getting threats from jealous prima donnas who’d been the centre of attention